• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 13, 2008

Jeff Berman, MySpace's recently appointed president of sales and marketing, is expected to announce plans today for a complete global redesign beginning next Wednesday, June 18 when the social network relaunches its home page.

"This is more than a facelift," according to a MySpace spokesman. "We're changing the way people interact with the site and with brands."

For the event, a major advertiser has signed on to take over the MySpace homepage on the first day of the new redesign, which users apparently won't see fully until June 19.

MySpace began its redesign project six months ago with the intention of creating more intuitive navigation, improving usability, and giving users easier access to MySpace's core community features such as music and video.

In due time, MySpace will completely overhaul its site navigation "to focus on MySpace as a community," the spokesman said.

The site is also updating its profile editor to make it easier for users to access a broader palette of page themes -- the first step in a complete profile and profile editor redesign.

There have been 20 billion searches globally on MySpace this year alone, according to the News Corp. unit. Now, search will have a consistent, clean user interface with enhanced relevancy scoring.

MySpace is working with Lucene Open-Source engine and community, marking the first time MySpace has contributed to the Open-Source community.

Users will also be able to filter their search queries by categories, including people, MySpace site, Web, music, and MySpace TV.

Finally, the MySpaceTV player has been overhauled to include a "scrubber," time-stamp, volume memory, new menu system, and better sharing functionality. The player also is expected to fully utilize Flash 9, with true full-screen mode.